Barbell Shrugged - Why Bodybuilders Have So Much Muscle w/ Coach Kassem, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash - Barbell Shrugged #516

Episode Date: October 28, 2020

Barbell Shrugged’s “Functional Fitness Bundle” is for the functional fitness athlete that wants to improve their strength, gymnastics, weightlifting and build a bigger engine in six weeks.   Program Goals: Improve Gymnastics Increase Raw Strength Master Olympic Lifts Brutal Anaerobic Endurance Metcons Build Aerobic Capacity Peak for the CrossFit Open   What you get: Seven Functional Fitness, Goal Specific Training Programs   Gymnastics Focused Functional Fitness - 6-Week Gymnastics Focused CrossFit Program  ($47) Shrugged Functional Weightlifting - 6-Week Olympic Weightlifting Focused CrossFit Program ($47) Strength Bias Functional Fitness - 6-Week Strength Bias CrossFit Program ($47) Anaerobic Assault - 12-Week Anaerobic Engine Building Accessory Program ($47) Aerobic Monster - 12-Week Aerobic Capacity Accessory Program ($47) Open Prep - 7-Week Competition Prep Cycle ($47) Advanced Functional Fitness Workout Builder - 6-Week Advanced CrossFit Strength and Conditioning Template ($47)   Total Retail Value $329 for all 7 Programs.   This week only, get all seven programs for $97, saving you 70% off retail.   Use code “functional” at checkout to save 70%.    7 Programs for the price of 2 saving you over $329.   Barbell Shrugged’s “Functional Fitness Bundle” is for the functional fitness athlete that wants to improve their strength, gymnastics, weightlifting and build a bigger engine in six weeks.   In this Episode of Barbell Shrugged:   Building private science lab for strength  How to accurately test strength and muscle How does hypertrophy correlate to performance Why don’t bodybuilders test 1 rep maxes Are bodybuilders actually strong?   Coach Kassem on Instagram Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram   ————————————————   Training Programs to Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/34zcGVw   Nutrition Programs to Lose Fat and Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/3eiW8FF   Nutrition and Training Bundles to Save 67%: https://bit.ly/2yaxQxa   Please Support Our Sponsors   Fittogether - Fitness ONLY Social Media App   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   www.masszymes.com/shruggedfree  - for FREE bottle of BiOptimizers Masszymes   Garage Gym Equipment and Accessories: https://bit.ly/3b6GZFj Save 5% using the coupon code “Shrugged”

Shrugged family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, Coach Kassem has an amazing story. He went and built a strength lab, like a real science lab, in the middle of Denver, Colorado. But the interesting thing is, he's not a scientist. He's just a dude that is really, really smart about hypertrophy, coaching people that have been on the Mr. Olympia stage, lots of strength athletes, and he's incredibly well-versed in hypertrophy, building muscle, and the people and the avenues in which he is going through testing is really incredible. I don't know anybody that's gone and just built their own lab because they're interested to learn. So I'm fired up for the show. I'm excited for you to see how far people will take the strength game.

And you're really going to enjoy this. But before we get into the show, I need to tell you about the functional fitness bundle that we have on sale this week on barbell shrug.com forward slash store. It is for functional fitness athletes that want to improve their strength, gymnastics, weightlifting, and build a bigger engine in six-week programs. There are seven programs in this bundle, encapsulating the five big areas of fitness that every functional fitness CrossFit athlete needs. Strength, Olympic lifting, gymnastics, increasing your work capacity, not just overall work capacity, but we have two programs, aerobic monster for long workouts,

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three days a week. Aerobic monsters, the same three days a week as an add on program. Open prep is a seven week prep cycle preparing you for the open. And then we have a do it yourself workout builder for an advanced functional fitness athlete. So that you can go in and specifically pick your weaknesses and build the workouts out. It's a much higher volume, higher kind of capacity program. So seven programs all for the price of $97 saving you 70% off. If you go over to barbellshrug.com forward slash FF bundle, it's barbellshrug.com forward slash FF bundle. And over there, it'll also be in the show notes. You should totally

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Use the code functional to save 70% right now, seven programs for the price of $297 saving you over 300 bucks. Let's get into the show. Welcome to barbell shrugged. I'm Anders Warner, Doug Larson, coach Travis mash coach, Cassim Hansen, creator of N1. Um, I had to keep you quiet. You were talking too much before the show. You got into all of the interesting things about oxygen, muscle. But you said something that already piqued my interest in how do we decide if an exercise is good or not. That's a very broad word, the idea of a good exercise. But before we get into that, can you just tell us like a little bit of your history? Dr. Ben House, who's one of my favorite humans on this planet,

told me that I needed to talk to you. And when he says I do, I need to talk to somebody, I hit him up right away. And that's how we got here. What's a little bit of your background and how do you get people so jacked? Well, I basically just got interested in the field through, you know, my own endeavors as a, you know, small kid in Iowa that was, you know, the smallest, smallest kid on the offensive line. And it was like, okay, we're going to have to hack the system a little bit because this isn't sustainable here, you know. And, you know, I just decided that I wanted to pursue this idea of test-tube to athlete, did everything I could from both the academic world and like the coaching world, which is what

kind of has led me to meet people, you know, like Ben House. And in that um i've worked with people on the olympia stage all sorts of stuff and one of the things that i kept running into um is every system has a lot of fundamental flaws or it would work for somebody and not the other and um that's one of the things that kind of led me to like start investigating the stuff on my own. Like, okay, let's look at things just at a pure individual level. Let's do everything that we need to from case studies to looking at different athletes. And I was fortunate enough to just have a huge Rolodex of very dedicated clientele, both in person and online,

to be able to, you know, kind of start this. And now we're, you know, I would say we're definitely at the top of the field in terms of teaching biomechanics and program design, at least in the, we'll say the professional realm, like the coaches and trainers, and at least leading the message of how to take and decide if something is good or beneficial or effective for someone on an individual level. Yeah. When you say that word good, what does that actually mean to you? Is it hypertrophy? Is it pure strength? Kind of how, what is, how are you categorizing the idea of

good when it comes to working with athletes and prescribing programs? Yeah. So good is going to be a mobile target, meaning that like in one particular day phase or whatever, the outcome that you may be looking for is going to be different. So really good means this is just, is this is an effective means of me going for whatever the target goal happens to be right now. Cause for one person that maybe I, I need to come up with a solution for them to improve their technique. Another person, their power. Another person, muscle mass. Another person is like, we got to get body fat off. So good will change with the individual and what their goal is at that particular time. So the same exercise that might be good for you now,

three months from now may no longer suit the goal that you're trying to achieve. So it could go from the bad, bad to good and lots of gray areas in between. Yeah. I'm actually really interested in kind of like an overall question because you don't have a PhD, correct? I do not. I decided after I got my BA that I was going to go more out into the private sector of education. And as soon as I got into that, probably about six months, I was planning on going back to grad school. And I was like,

I am really digging, like going, taking this route of like going to the people that are the current experts in the field and learning directly from them rather than sitting in a classroom. And so I just decided that's where I'm going to put my time, my money for the next four years. And I dumped like 200 grand and just like going and seeing, I was traveling at least one week a month over like

a two year span just for private education. Yeah. My, my question really wasn't about you not being a PhD, but the amount of work that you're putting in and you're building a lab in your gym and doing a lot of the work that somebody in a PhD program would be doing. And something that I've noticed as like a big trend lately is a lot of people that are not in the academic setting, but are still kind of putting in some of that, like the academic looking work and running a lot of tests in their own, you could call it a lab, like you have built or just on their own clients. In doing what you're doing, building a lab, running a lot of tests, experimenting with people and your clients, like, how do you kind of compare the two paths? And

obviously, you've gone the private route and not academia. But do you see benefits to each and maybe some of the drawbacks that you've come across? Well, I think, you know, the world and the industry definitely needs both. For me personally, and this is the same reason I directed my education, is that I kind of wanted to focus on the things that I wanted to focus on. And so what we're doing right now, you'd almost classify it as like it's informal research. But we're able to say, hey, we want to look at this very specific thing, this very specific population, and we have the access to do that. We have the equipment.

We have the, you know, the freaks of nature people that maybe we want to, you know, that's the population that we want to study. And, you know, we have the means to do it. And at the academic level, there is a lot that goes into designing a study and then doing it. And then a lot of times, by the time you get to the actual paper, it's like what you've been able to accomplish over that period of time is very, very small. And there's still very, there's still a lot of value in, you know, those big population sizes and the high controls that they do. And so what I did is I built a lab, basically, where we can measure acute stuff and get data on the day, meaning that today, I can go and I can take a few athletes and we can run something. And then by the end of

the day, I'll be like, we learned something today. Um, and I don't need, you know, um, I won't be able to investigate the same thing. Like I don't have a meta, I'm not going to be able to throw people in a metabolic ward and see like, you know, some of these things, uh, that would happen in that tightly controlled environment. But we right now, it's like, I'm trying to figure out, okay okay what are the strategies that we can use in the trenches and my goal hopefully actually is is that the things that we figure out actually inspire better academic research like my goal is that we kind of take the blueprint of what we're doing at the lab and then we can send it you know to like bill campbell

lab in florida or something like hey here's what we're finding on these training protocols acutely do you think you know maybe you would want to run like a 16-week controlled study on that or something that would actually get published and make it to the academia whereas me it's like as long as we're as long as we're like discovering and learning i don't care if anybody ever publishes a paper off of what we're doing. I'm definitely envious of what you're saying because I'm in that world, you know, in the academia world, working towards a PhD. And, like, you know, we can't just do whatever we want. I can't just, you know, and all the time I see things I want to do, but, like, I can't because, like, you know,

I've got to be focused on a certain area. Or, you know, maybe they want me to get a grant, and, you know, not many grants are going to cover the stuff that I did. Like it's hypertrophy or power production or fiber types. Like they don't care because big pharma is not going to get cut out of it. So I'm definitely admiring that. I'm curious when it comes to individual testing, like what are some of your testing protocols? If I were going to come to you and I said, Hey man, maybe as big and strong as possible. Like what are some of your testing protocols? If I were going to come to you and I said, hey, man, maybe as big and strong as possible, like, what are some of the testing tests that you would run on me to know what individual route to take? Well, I would say that it's not all going to be dependent on lab work for that aspect, right? So

we look at, like, the main principle that drives our decisions is what we call trainability, which is basically trying to do the investigation of what types of stress and stimulus can a person get a positive adaptation for versus which things are kind of not going to yield a positive adaptation. And so a lot of it's from the history, but then the stuff that we're figuring out from the lab is that we can kind of look at the ratio of somebody's cardiovascular capacity versus their, like we'll say, you know, neuromuscular efficiency or their ability to produce tension, can kind of look at the ratio of somebody's cardiovascular capacity versus their, like, we'll say, you know, neuromuscular efficiency or their ability to produce tension, meaning that there's going to be this tug of war between the pressure that's being produced in the muscle, depending on how much tension you create, and your cardiovascular system's ability to actually

drive blood and oxygen to that tissue to be able to sustain capacity. So if I can create a ton of tension, it makes it harder for me to get blood in there, right? If I don't create a ton of tension, well, I don't produce a lot of power, but I may be able to perform a long time. So depending on the performance metrics that a person may need to have versus like, okay, maybe my goal is just to be able to have hypertrophy like right now we're trying to and this is stuff that we're kind of like still investigating we're trying to find out like what's that kind of optimal ratio of you know systemic function versus local function to be able to produce maximum mechanical tension stimulus versus somebody that needs to be

a power out person versus somebody that needs to be more an endurance person because those things those are things probably that you know coaches have been doing instinctively forever but we're able to start now actually look and see like okay what's happening so for instance me and my staff we just did this arm curl study using different resistance profiles to see how those resistance profiles would affect the hemodynamics right like how many effective reps am i able to get in terms of like the i'm working in a fatigue state here and how fast does that muscle get to a point of fatigue we're kind of looking at that in terms of how fast the oxygen dissipates from the muscle and then also well is the blood volume going up and down is being squeezed out um and it was quite different between me and a couple of the other people and i'll use this as

a humble brag point this is like i was able to squeeze a ton of tension out of there so i must be doing something right that was the only reason i beat a ball this whole i bought this whole lab for uh bragging rights you know so it like, I don't need to have abs. I have charts and numbers and stuff, right? Look, it says I'm awesome. Exactly. But it was interesting to see, because we've got a guy on the team that's a power lifter.

And when we're looking at his, it's obvious that he couldn't desaturate his oxygen as well as I could. And one of the theories behind that is like his mitochondria just aren't as efficient at using oxygen. Right. So he has a different rate limiter of what's causing him to reach fatigue than what I do. Right. And so like being able to actually see that and be like, okay, so now this would actually give you tangible evidence to say, Hey dude, it's time to actually do some higher reps, you know,

and maybe some systemic conditioning. Cause that's your bottleneck right now for getting a training effect um right like you're having to be more inefficient with your volume to continue making progress than if you were to bring up this other system that's kind of the bottleneck that's interesting because in today's world of like um i feel like in the last 10 years you see a lot of powerlifters who do a lot of bulgarian-ish programs you know like uh lane norton greg knuckles and it's focused on a lot of singles you know like working up to like daily maxes and which is going to only be tapping into that you know creatine phosphate world it's not going to tap into the oxidative stresses at all.

And they've seen some good progress, but you're saying that if maybe they would do both, it would probably long-term be better? Yeah. The hard thing for people to understand, especially when they're making some progress, is that where that rate of progress exists in the realm of no progress to optimal, right?

Are they pushing close to optimal? Or it's like, well, hey, I'm still making progress. But it's like, you could be making progress 50% faster, twice as fast, if you didn't have this other thing that was actually limiting your training potential or limiting your recovery or whatever it may be. And that's kind of our focus on the individuals is like finding these bottlenecks. So it's like how can we make sure that like if your goal is hypertrophy, that there isn't something that is going to be a limiting factor other than your ability to like stimulate that

and training and like to do all the things that are in your control. But if it's like, man, the thing that's limiting for you is that you're just so systemically deconditioned or whatnot that, you know, you're spending way much more time in a sympathetic dominance during the day, right? You're just not that efficient at utilizing energy. That's for sure. Yeah. Your recovery sucks, right? And hypertrophy is a recovery sport, right? It's not, it's basically who recovers the best. You look at every big pro bodybuilder they're not the people that are like you know let's go hard and crush like you know 24 7 365 they're

pretty chill they're professional recoverers right that's how you get a lot actually that was i remember when we interviewed ben pokulski who i think he used to work with in some some capacity um and he said that bodybuilders are like the most mellow dudes I was like really like that I had no idea that as a culture that bodybuilders were just really relaxed laid-back guys because it just instantly puts them in a recovery state as soon as they leave the gym it's just mellow time time to grow yeah it's definitely on average and definitely like a higher percentage of the not only just more successful guys but the guys that have the longer careers tend to have that mindset that personality that's just much more calm and even keel right you get your you know your occasional oddity but what the thing that

i kind of see is that those people tend to have very short careers yeah um you know because they're burning the candle at both ends maybe they're compensating with you know a little extra liquid supplementation you know to try and make up for that recovery and that's not necessarily a better recipe than actually just doing the things that would allow your body to naturally recover i feel like really mellow people a lot of times they also have the ability to stay very consistent like they're very routine oriented as opposed to like if you're super party animal mr extroverted like you don't really thrive on consistency the same way that that more analytical um kind of routine oriented people do so i feel feel like for bodybuilding, since it's a true 24 hour job, like you're, you're always on the clock in bodybuilding, as you said, it's a recovery

sport. That means like sleeping and eating. That's really like the majority of that job and lifting weights is the fun part in a lot of ways. I feel like that's why that potentially could be the case. Have you seen that? Yeah, if you're routine adverse, the physique sports are probably not a good venture for you, right? But you'll also see the opposite in like high performance demand, like explosive based sports. It's just like those people tend to be wired a little bit different. So if you look in bodybuilding, those guys tend to be wired in a way that, you know, the routine actually almost becomes important. Like when they're off routine, they get anxious. And then

when you look at some of the more like performance based athletes, the hard part for them is following like the routine. But when they get a chance to express, like they're the ones that always want, you know, it's like, man, like, this is too boring boring i need to go off plan i need to do exciting you know i need to you know express that adrenaline junkie uh you know i need to fulfill that need um which is i mean there's nothing wrong with either of those but if that's you you're probably never going to be 300 pounds of muscle mass on stage that's just that's the reality of it yeah yeah you mentioned the bicep curl thing and blood flow and all that those are very specific example but if we zoom out do you have like a big comprehensive evaluation process to find the the biggest weaknesses that are holding people back kind of the weak links in their chain

so what i'll let you guys know is i think we're we're about five weeks of having all of the tech that we have right now. So our projects right now are fairly simple in that we're trying to kind of validate the things that we're already doing. So right now we're doing a bunch of comparisons of exercises to say, okay, does this exercise bias more of the lower fiber of the lats versus this other one, right? Which one of these things is better for targeting the VM fiber of the lats versus this other one right which one of these things is you know better for targeting the vmo versus the lateralis and actually using multiple technologies for that stuff um in terms of the individualization then it really comes to taking that data and then applying it to the individual's goals and kind of their unique structure so for instance say we take somebody you know and they're

coming in and they want to grow quads and they got the short torso and long femur so when they squat they're they're very bent over what we can do is we can take all of the data that we're learning about exercise selection and then take their structure into consideration be like okay so maybe these would be better tools for you right so maybe we're gonna throw you in like a heel elevated hack squat type motion and we're gonna do pauses here and then like that because that's gonna allow you to accomplish the qualities that we need out of the exercise with your body type because you're not going to squat like a chinese lifter that has a really you know long torso and short femurs you know which is what everybody is like Oh, that's the king of the squat or the baby squat, right? Like you don't have, you know, 30% of your weight as your head

anymore, right? So until ego actually has a tangible weight, there's gonna be a lot of people that can't do a baby style squat. Just browsing your YouTube real quick here. I've seen something about squat wedges and heels elevated squatting a couple times. Is that a very common thing that you guys are doing over there? I feel like I heard about raising heels for squatting a lot when I was kind of more in the physique bodybuilding-ish world growing up. And then hanging out in the CrossFit world for the last 10 or 12 years, they don't talk about that quite as much, even though it's still a tool that is around. How do you guys use that? And why is it as prominent as it looks at first glance on your YouTube channel? Well, so there's two reasons that we use the heel wedge.

One is just for somebody that has poor anthropomorphic so that they can't get full depth without having something that is basically going to alter the environment for them. And the other is lifting the heel. What it basically does is it allows you to push the knee further forward so if we get the knee further away from your center of mass it allows us to put a higher percentage of the load you're carrying on the quads right so you could be doing that from a mechanics perspective of like okay we're just trying to get more range um and somebody that just is not built very well to squat or you could take somebody that's like yeah i'm built to

squat but i want this squat to be a little bit more quad dominance. So it really comes down to the context that you need it. So when you're looking at like a week plan and you got your different exercises, if you have a day where you're doing like heavy hinging, you're doing some RDLs or some deadlifts or whatever, if I can make your other squat day less hip dominant and more quad dominant, then that's not going to affect your performance on that hip dominant day. So it gives us a lot more programming options when we can take an exercise like a squat, where you're kind of just constrained to whatever your body allows. And now we can start biasing it towards certain tissues to both target that more

on one day but also alleviate some tissues so that they could perform better or i could train at a higher frequency uh throughout that week you know in a different motor pattern what what do you use to do your testing i i saw on your site i think you use EMG for wine, but like, um, what are some of the other tools that you use? Um, so we're using Moxie, uh, which is muscle oxygen sensor, or technically it's called NIRS, NIR infrared spectroscopy, um, say that 10 times fast. And that's the one that's measuring the percentage of oxygen and the amount of hemoglobin um and then we're also measuring we have a couple different ways of measuring force data and then also acceleration and telemetry right so we can see motion um and we what we did

is uh the system the main system we got is called an irson. The reason we went with that is it allows us to sync all of these devices together in video so that I can actually be watching a video of a rep and see where all of this stuff happens, which allows me to test things in the training world rather than, like, most EMG studies, you take somebody and you have them do a symmetric on a position. Right. Okay, that's better than no data. But one of the things that we found is that the isometric data does not transfer very well to what the full range of motion data shows.

Like we see things separate out a lot more in terms of our ability to bias a certain muscle in full range of motion versus having somebody do an isometric. And I think that's just because there's too much, you have too many opportunities to co-contract and compensate when you're holding a static position versus when you actually have to move something through space with a specific vector so this is allowing us to kind of see how all of that stuff overlaps because each technology has its has its pros and cons like prior to us getting this lab, I was like, EMG, the majority of the studies are absolutely garbage. And then I bought the most expensive EMG on the market.

And people are like, did you change your opinion? I'm like, no. It still has its pros and cons. So it's part of the equation. But I'm not going to make any conclusions solely based on that one piece of information. Totally agree. solely based on that one piece of information totally agree like one of the big things i want to do in my phd is is athlete testing um which you know you're opening my eyes to a whole new world have you heard of like omega wave where it monitors like cns i didn't want to hijack your question but i was so ready to talk about that yeah so like So like, have you guys, have you used that at all? Have you tested it out?

We have not used that yet. We may, that may be, you know, you know, a purchase in the future. We'll see. But right now,

for like the exercise selection aspect and what we're trying to do, we probably have a good year of running experiments on just the, the technologies that we have right now. One thing I was actually interested in when you're talking about putting people on the stage at Olympia and just bodybuilders in general, I've always wondered what their top end strength training looks like and how much time they spend in pure hypertrophy rep ranges. And even when they

start to fail, it's half reps and they're just trying to maximize as much as they spend in pure hypertrophy rep ranges. And even when they start to fail, it's half reps. And they're just trying to maximize as much as they possibly can out of each set, whether it's 8, 12, 15, kind of getting into those higher rep ranges. But how often are those guys, when you're trying to build gigantic humans, are they focused on one threes, fives, heavy doubles? Like how does that fit into their, their training? Well, I know there's some people that have historically used more like heavy reps, but in terms of just pure efficacy, it's a very, it's very, very minimal.

And the other thing is, is that when you got guys that are that big, I mean, one, just having that much tissue starts altering your mechanics in some of these big movements. So you're like risk-to-reward ratio starts changing when your quads are sticking 14 inches off of your thigh. It's like, okay, that's a lot of tension that can be created and these guys are training with different volumes and stuff than a typical you know strength athlete would be so um it's it's when you're when you're getting down there like sub four reps there's very very little

application to the bodybuilding other than maybe somebody who wants to do it because they particularly enjoy that or there's a there's a psychological component to it what about all the studies coming out saying that like hypertrophy is not necessarily rep dependent as much as it is just going to failure so whether it's three reps four reps 15 reps 10 reps um like what is it chris beersley would say that it doesn't really matter? What matters more is taking it to almost failure as often as possible. So that's the effective reps theory. And the simplest way I can describe that to people is that we talk about mechanical tension being the driver for hypertrophy. I think the thing that goes over most people's head when they just hear tension is they just assume like, okay, like if I'm holding 40 pounds versus 20 pounds, 40 pounds is more tension, right? But that's not actually what we're talking about when we're talking about mechanical tension.

We're talking about the tension at the fiber level. So that's a relationship between how many fibers are acting on a load at a given time and how much internal tension are they creating. And that's where this proximity to fatigue comes in because as you start to fatigue, right, it's essentially like you got like, you know, you're playing tug of war and all of a sudden you got guys that start dropping off on one side, right? Now the remaining guys are having to do more work. And that's essentially what's happening as we start to approach fatigue, which is why a certain amount of fatigue, regardless of rep range, is going to be needed for us to stimulate tension at the fiber level, right? And so look at that as that's like widely accepted as the strongest stimulator for hypertrophy.

It's's like, yeah, we're going to have to go to some fatigue. Now in terms of rep range doesn't matter. What I would say when we look at population studies, you can say, okay, as a population, people can achieve hypertrophy everywhere from like 30%, you know, to like 90 some percent of their one rep max, as long as they're

going uh close to failure you can say that at a population level that does not hold true for an individual an individual may have may exist on that spectrum but they're going to exist in a smaller window on that spectrum so that's one of the that's one of the things with taking population data it's like that doesn't mean everybody, right? Because that's on average people get results between here and here. But that doesn't mean that if you just decide that you want to start training at 30% of your 1RM, that if you go to failure, that you're going to get just as good results than if you were training at 50%. Because for you, that window is smaller than 30 to 90.

You exist likely – the odds are you exist somewhere in between there, but you don't own that whole range. And you're able to test that with oxidative levels? Is that how you guys find out what rep range the ERC should be in? Yeah, so I'll give a shout-out to Evan Pycon because he's kind of the guy that we're working with on the MOXIE data right now in terms of interpretation. But that's what we've been able to take

with the work that he's done is that based off of when somebody is able to create the amount of tension that they start basically occluding the venous blood flow. So they basically start holding blood within that muscle, right? And it starts backing up the oxygen that's going down. Now we're getting to that state of biochemical fatigue, which will force the higher mechanical tension stimulus, right?

So we can actually look and see, all right, at what intensity ranges do you actually reach those pressures in your muscle? And that's going to be relative like at the beginning to the cardiovascular system so yes we can we can we can kind of measure and predict that now right um but we're talking like we're we're pioneers in this field right now so i don't i want to just just want to put yeah it's the first time i've heard of it so yeah you definitely are i mean it's it's definitely um yeah something i definitely want to put that out there that aspect it's the first time i've heard of it so yeah you definitely are i mean it's it's definitely um yeah something i definitely want to hear more about when you guys get you know some more pioneering done that sounds awesome you know how about with like um strength

athletes let's say that say that a guy who wants to be a great weightlifter powerlifter come you know would it be the same testing would you see like where he should be and where she spent most of his time as far as rep ranges? Or would you say because you're this kind of an athlete, you should get this rep range? Is there any specificity to the sport? When you get to where there's a performance goal, right? I think that the performance demand is still going to probably be the main driver when

you're talking about improving that quality i mean if you need to express strength in a single like being close to single is still like there's a skill component there's a neuromuscular component there um and obviously as we're getting down to single reps these energetics and stuff are simply not coming into play as much because there's just not that much time under attention. However, when you take that athlete further away from competition and you're like, okay, we need to put on a little bit of muscle or whatnot,

then absolutely then we can use this data. But I don't know how well we'd be able to protect it, at least on the strength side of it. How well we'd be able to say, should you do triples or doubles or, you know, or whatever, is there a benefit?

Cause reality, it's probably going to, it's probably going to come down to other, other training variables and things that we need to do. The exercise we're picking, that stuff is going to have a hierarchy over the energy systems at that point in time. Cause it's just so small time under tension.

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Friends, let's get back to the show. But on the other end, on the endurance end, definitely a ton of application. And if you guys want to talk about that, you should get Evan Pykin on the show because, like, I don't really have a lot of interest in doing things for long periods of time. By evidence of my high tension bicep curl. Well, you've been training for that forever. You made it. Have you guys done any research or do you just have general thoughts on how different muscle groups respond to different rep ranges is there an ideal rep range that you know for pecs that is you know radically different than you know we'll say calves or

forearms on the extreme end um i don't think that there's gonna be a like you say like okay pecs are always going to respond better to this rep range. It's really going to come down to an individual is going to have, they're going to be somewhere on the spectrum and they're also going to have some variation in their body. Um, so it, uh, I wish it was a simple for us to say like, oh yeah, here's the, here's the landmarks for pecs and here's the landmarks for hamstrings. But basically all the data that we have right now suggests that that's not a, that's, that's not a thing. You may have one athlete that like their upper body can, you know, hypertrophy at a much higher rep range in their lower body. And then another person that may be flipped based off of their exercise history, how much,

you know, muscle mass they've had there and whatnot. Right. So for instance, if you've been doing, you know, a lot of conditioning work because you played you know sports that required you to run around when you're younger um but the first time you ever really did anything with your upper body was just resistance training it might be a lot harder for you to get occlusion in your lower body because you've just you've gotten like you have more capillaries and well you just learned your body is adapted to be able to get blood flow to that tissue and it just functions differently from its neuromuscular patterns and whatnot that you're not as good at expressing maximal strength but you're very good at expressing capacity and so you may need a different rep range for your lower body than your upper body right and for somebody else like depending on what their

sport may have been maybe they're an offensive lineman they may have very different like pushing muscle to pulling muscles simply because you know they've been doing bench press and stuff like i remember you know when i was playing college football our we had a bicep curl and like a lot pull down that was that was like the extent of the pulling exercises right it's like so it's like okay like 12 pushes to like these two poles that have always occurred at the very end of the workout, right? Like after you've done like 16 other things, like, all right, now everybody get a pump before you, you know, go grab your Gatorade. That's about right. Yeah, you're going to have very different, like probably demands then. And it's going to be fluid.

It's going to be fluid over time, which is why our focus is always looking at the individual level because I think as soon as you start trying to put people in buckets, all you're doing is just saying, okay, I'm accepting that I'm not going to be accurate and I'm hoping this person maybe fits in an average on this thing. But then it's like when you start stacking and I'm hoping that you exist on an average, average on an average across the things like inaccuracy is going to start to scale up pretty fast i feel like the whole industry like not just bodybuilding but like like every hold on

i don't know more to interval hold up no we to individual... I'm going to make a note. You're back, but let me make a note here where we're at so I can get that cut out. We're good now, though. You're a little fuzzy. Go ahead and try and repeat your question. I was just saying that

the whole industry is going to individualization. I feel like, you know, it's messed up. Let me get out of my car. I couldn't hear exactly what he said, but something about the industry is going toward being more individualized as far as people's approach to training programs. Well, I would say definitely the marketing is going more towards that programs are individualized. But I would say as a whole, I don't think that goal is actually being accomplished by

most of the people that are advertising it, right? I think for a big chunk of the industry, individualized just means that you actually get your own name on your program. And sometimes that doesn't even happen. They're just giving someone a cookie cutter program for a specific goal, but it's not actually individualized to the person. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. So I think when we look at individualization it's like okay can we put this in the context of how individualized is this this is like okay you ask for you know a leg

dominant program here's a leg dominant program like what is in what what qualifies as individualized if we're talking about individualizing on somebody's like biomechanical and physiological needs i'd say a very very small percentage of people are actually working towards that goal most of the individualization i would say and this is not that this is uh less or more important than the former is is more of like okay how many times a week are you going to train and like let's match this to your lifestyle and your commitments which that obviously especially in general population prioritizes a lot of things in terms of optimal physiology because it doesn't matter how well the program's designed from a biomechanics or physiology perspective if a person isn't actually going to go through the program and it's not

sustainable for them but so when we look at, what are people doing in terms of individual individualization? I think it's a hot topic. So everybody wants to include like that, that word that soundbite in what they do. But people are doing it on very drastically different levels from like, barely any individualization to I think the majority of the industry is focusing on, like, let me make sure this plan works for you, individualization, and then a very small group of people are working on like biomechanic and physiological level individualization. And that's probably in terms of what the industry needs if we look at like, well, the majority of people that are focusing on know, focusing on or hiring a coach or whatnot,

if we're looking at general population, that probably is where it needs to be. If we're looking at dedicated athletes, then the physiology stuff starts becoming a lot more important, right? Those people are training harder, they're training more frequently, and, you know, they're naturally dedicated and committed at that point. I think the industry, what I was saying before my stupid internet axe went down, but is that

the whole industry at that elite athlete level is going to more individualized programming. The whole point of my PhD is nothing but that. To learn how to individualize it to the nth degree, whether it be looking at energy systems or using

velocity on a daily basis to gauge if somebody is near their maximum capacity or if they're way off base, but to make daily individualized choices and long-term individualized choices. But the whole industry, whether it's strength, powerlifting, weightlifting weightlifting strongman bodybuilding i feel like we are all making our moves to you know for us to get to that next level because things have gotten crazy in the last 10 years i think we could all agree things have gone crazy bodybuilders are bigger and more ripped than ever weightlifters are stronger than ever powerlifters are stronger than ever so to get to that next level it's going to take individualization, I think.

Yeah, and it's definitely the place to go. And it's a fairly new thing considering that if you look at sports, five years ago maybe is when really teams started individualizing like conditioning and strength drills by position. Before, it's like, yeah, your 350-pound offensive lineman was doing the same sprint drill as your 170-pound cornerback. It's like, yeah, that's not an efficient way to do things. Yeah. Earlier in the show, you mentioned the words effective reps.

How are you guys measuring that, and how can somebody that doesn't have all of the tools that you have at your disposal kind of understand that concept and and apply it to their training and where they start to break down and and not get the optimal like optimal results from from their effort so let's put an end point to this by qualifying failure. Cause when we say effective reps, really what we're going to gauge those by is by proximity to failure. And it's easy for people to say like, well, okay, failure,

but they may be thinking task failure, which is like, what's the last time I could do that activity versus a failure point where it's like, when's the last time I could do that activity versus a failure point where it's like, when's the last time I could do that activity in a specific manner? So you got somebody that squats, they might be able to grind out two reps that looked fundamentally different than the prior reps. If our goal is hypertrophy, we're going to define failure as that point of like your last technically sound rep, the last rep that we're actually doing with that tissue because reaching like the gap between that and task failure is usually

accomplished by compensation where other muscles are starting to do the load and in that case instead of getting more effective reps what we actually see like when we're looking at the data is we see that the emg signal and the oxygen levels say like, well, that muscle's actually taking these reps off. So effective reps are the ones we're getting close enough to fatigue that some of our tissue can't work. So the remaining tissue is having to work harder. Yeah.

In the lab, we see that as higher EMG. We see that as decreased oxygen desaturation. And we see it as decreased velocity. So the velocity one is probably the easiest one aside from just like your own like feel and instinct is actually looking at the reps where you're starting to slow down. That would say is be your best way of kind of looking at that is that you're, go ahead. I'm so curious, you know, with velocity, like at what, you know, at what point do you consider that, you know, maximum hypertrophy? How much of a loss of velocity? Is there a percentage you're looking for?

It's different for every exercise unfortunately um so really really what you if you wanted to create a standardization what you would do is you would take an exercise and you would take it to complete failure technical failure and then what you would do is you would say okay look at the speed of that very last rep right and the research tend to suggest that regardless of rep range, your speed of your last technically competent rep is the same at failure. Right. So, so like if you're doing a set of 12 versus a set of six, the speed on the last rep because of the cumulative fatigue at that point in

time is about the same speed. So if you wanted to like, you know, and I think to be honest that it's good to try and hit that point on a fairly regular basis we tend to use like a an ascending rpe or descending rir where like okay if i'm doing several sets i'm not i don't like the programs where it's like all right you're going to do five sets at an eight rp usually we say like all right well instead of that maybe we're going to do like a six seven eight nine ten or something like that where we're taking one set to that failure point.

So we always know where that is. Like we know what that rep looks like. We know what it feels like. And then I can judge how close am I getting to that, right? Because if you're six weeks into a program, you're like your 1rm and your failure point are different and the other and also your perception of that fatigue can change like when you start a new exercise it's technically more difficult right if you start a conditioning program and you're just a little out of shape it's physically harder like it's just more fatiguing to do that activity

you know at the same degree of failure than later when it's like okay maybe i'm not as winded now doing this activity but i can still work just as hard muscular but it may feel less fatiguing so my subjective rpe may be off a few weeks into that that training program than where i started and that's where i think um if you if you want to if you want to know where your effective reps are you have to be at least getting pretty close to the failure on some of your sets so you know where that moving target is all the time yeah i was thinking i was thinking when we when you're talking about kind of how the the movement pattern starts to break down it's easier to it's it seems easier to judge something like that when you're on an ex like a leg extension or a leg curl machine where there's a single joint moving and then all of a

sudden your hips rise up and you go oh well we clearly something broke there and it didn't work when we have a back squat it's way harder to judge something like that and you go, oh, well, we clearly something broke there and it didn't work. When we have a back squat, it's way harder to judge something like that. And you don't, it's because there's such a load on the bar or there's so many moving parts and your back can kind of come in and you don't really know exactly what's moving the bar and the speed of the bar may be the same. So in these big compound movements, is it something that people can really judge just based off of RPE? Or is this something that they should apply really specifically to kind of accessory work or isolation movements? Well, your ability to do it in compound exercises is just going to be competency dependent.

So if you're not very confident in your squat squat then this is probably not a good place to take it to failure or at the very least you probably need a combination of visual evidence and like and what your subjective rrp is like you need to you need to film yourself so that you can see like oh that squat was more hingy than the rep before so actually even though i got those two more i probably should should have stopped there. And your competency in terms of understanding how you want the body to move throughout those movements from a biomechanics perspective is going to be very helpful too, so that you understand what am I looking for to determine this? So if we're looking at a squat, is it that rep where

my knees don't go forward as much but my butt goes back further right or or do we get even more where it's like some people it's like well okay some people when they get to the bottom they finish with like their torso going forward and other people finish with their butt going forward and you'll actually see that as people start to fatigue that that may change in terms of like okay how are they actually managing that load on their body because your body's always going to try and use the most efficient thing to oppose the resistance sure now valgus yeah there's something about knee valgus too you know that a lot of people start to use that as you know as a way of compensating as well you know

like uh that's a lot of people doing that just just read some cool new studies, you know, the abductor magnus, it kicks and gets like a second stretch reflex. And it's also, you know, known to be actually a pretty good hip extensor as well. So when they start to do that, then you're exactly right. Like things have gone awry and now you're not, you're working a whole brand new muscle set and you're taking tension off of what you're trying to actually accomplish the adductors are terribly named because the adductor magnus is the most hip extension of the adductors yeah so it should be the adductor minimus and because it does more yeah extension and the least amount of adduction and the adductor minimus does a ton of adduction like no hip flexion extension so that's pretty recent

finding there but yeah from a biomechanics model that's like old news from a this is this is one of the problems with like only depending on the academic research it's like oh that's new news and i'm like well i mean i can i can draw a whiteboard and show you that like that that's been that way since you know the stone age right since we've had femurs that's been how it works right also i was told growing up up that your adductor magnus is your fourth hamstring. That was how it was explained to me at first, and I never forgot that.

I was going to say, I saw a couple places on your Instagram, you were talking about progressive overload and auto-regulation. Regarding auto-regulation, how do you guys use that? Who do you think that is beneficial for, et cetera, et cetera? I think auto-regulation is beneficial for every goal. It's just that you'll look at different factors. So if we're looking at progressive overload and we stick with hypertrophy, for instance,

what we try and do is increase the quality of sets before we would say increase the volume. This tends to be a hot topic right now, progressive overload. And I kind of threw some shade at the industry at the beginning of the year. Like nobody's covered this topic like well. And I think that's actually, you know, possibly one of the reasons it's getting discussed so much. But there was like this paradigm of like, okay, do we add more reps and weight or do we add more volume how do we know which of those things and that's where i think the auto regulation can be um it can be very valuable because it can let you know like do i need to add another set if i'm not getting every

as much as i can out of the current sets that i'm doing and that's kind of the the approach that we're taking we're looking at it as like, how do I increase my volume of effective reps? Because that's what the stimulus is most efficiently. Is it going up in RPE by adding load or adding reps? Or is that just going to bring me to maintenance? So obviously, if you're doing four sets at very high RPEs, you really don't have much room to climb. So your only alternative is to to add a set right so i look at auto regulation as a tool of managing what type of

progression i can make uh towards the particular goal that i'm trying to achieve so if you have somebody that's focused more on fat loss to be like okay we're trying to get more of a metabolic stimulus maybe not like effective rest for hypertrophy. So then it might be like, okay, what is my RPE for a given like exercise rather than just a single set? Like, am I actually exhausting that? Or could we accumulate some more like volume load in this activity? Could I cut down on that rest interval a little bit and make it a little bit more challenging, right? So that I could work on different training variables that are just more appropriate to increasing the metabolic stimulus rather than the mechanical stimulus. So being able to track how a given set feels, how it feels after you're done with all of those sets, and then how you feel after a workout as a

whole, I think you're really valuable for letting you know where those decisions are. Like, okay, which exercise am I going to improve on? Or am I going to improve on a different metric? Like I'm going to take out rest, I'm going to take out tempo, or now we're going to superset these exercises instead of doing one and then the other to maybe tax the body a little bit more aerobically or systemically. You have so many options as long as you kind of as long as you have data i just read the latest study that said though that metabolic is is not near as good as like we might have thought about you know a few

years ago as far as the you know the hormonal release which was the big thing that they used to think that the hormonal release was the big key to hypertrophy. But then of weight, it appeared, at least in this study, that that was almost of zero value. But do you disagree with that? So there is a place for it? Value of what, right? Like, I mean, if we're talking hypertrophy stimulus. That's what it was all about, hypertrophy, yeah. Then, yeah, right.

But this is one of the problems that I see in terms of programming and periodization is that we look at hypertrophy in a vacuum. Like, okay, you want to train hypertrophy, so all of your programs are going to exist what we looked at in terms of hypertrophy in a vacuum. But what you start to lose context then is of the systems that are affecting recovery and things outside of that. Agreed, yeah. So if we look at, okay, what is going to upregulate protein synthesis, it's not going to be metabolic training. But if we start looking at, well, how long can you stay away from metabolic training before your capacity to volume goes down, before it starts affecting your recovery, the ever 23 hours of the day, before it starts

affecting your ability to get nutrients back into that cell and your levels of glycogen storage and all these other things so the meta the benefit of metabolic training in terms of like looking directly at the way we're measuring protein synthesis or the the genes that we're turning on for hypertrophy yeah it's it's going to be weak because you know what you get from metabolic training you get metabolic stimulus you know what you get from mechanical loading you get get metabolic stimulus. You know what you get from mechanical loading? You get mechanical stimulus. But that doesn't mean that when we start looking at the big picture,

when we start looking at a year, six months or whatnot, that, man, we would have made better progress if we took a couple weeks to work on conditioning. Well, that's well said. And do you know Brian Mann, he's like, I guess he was a big pioneer in the velocity world, which we need to get him on our show, by the way. But he said that when he measures, obviously he uses velocity all the time.

And when his athletes are like 10% slower than normal, their velocity is 10% off, he goes away from everything they had planned that day and it goes nothing but bodybuilding for that hormonal release the metabolic conditioning to to spike recovery and so and i totally agree there's more you know like you can't put things in a vacuum so totally agree with that yeah so if we're looking at on the day does metabolic is metabolic training the efficient way of getting hypertrophy today the answer is no if you were to ask me but is it important for me

like reaching my maximal hypertrophy goals yes absolutely it needs to be periodized in there agreed so even it's just sports i would agree 100 yeah when you're looking at kind of like a year long cycle, how do you set up like a full year and call it a, call it a bodybuilder? Somebody that's more focused on hypertrophy. How are you, how are you building out like a full year? for the decision because i don't really believe in long-term periodization for physique goals i believe why not because i think that you need to be more reactive to what's going on rather than pre-planning yes but was like because like outside of like well if you have a competition there's going to be certain things that we're probably going to try and do leading up to that competition but if my goal is just like over this year i'm trying to get bigger, right? Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to start working on a particular stimulus, and I'm going to ride that. And then when I start to see like maybe some recovery factors or something are starting to decline, that's when I'm going to leave.

I'm not going to say, well, you know, I'm not seeing as good results, but the program says three more weeks, so I'm going to go three more weeks. Like why? Why not periodize out, bring up the recovery system, and then come back and do that program or that type of training again when it's effective? If we're going to spend 52 weeks training, why don't we try and make all 52 weeks productive

rather than spending a quarter of the year and, like, just trying to squeeze the tiniest bit of juice out of the orange? Like, man, just get a fresh orange and squeeze that thing right i mean we're yeah we're not we're not concerned if you're in hypertrophy you're not concerned about waste like your carbon footprint is bigger than you know bigger than the biggest suv on the planet so we're obviously not being conservative it's like let's make everything count would it wouldn't there be a value in spending some quality time in the year to get stronger? Because then, therefore, when you go back to doing your, you know, whatever your percentage that you find is optimal for the individual, so they could use more weight for that same rep range or no?

Yeah, so that's what I'm always looking for is I'm trying to figure out what's the bottleneck for me being able to drive the main stimulus and adaptation that I'm going for. So if I'm going for a purge fee, I'm looking at, all right, as soon as results are starting to come down, I'm looking at what is the limiting factor, right? Is it simply we need to be more neurologically efficient, so we need to go into a strength block? Is it that we need to be conditioned more systemically? We need to be more conditioned locally? Is it simply that we just need a deloadad or whatever it may be so that's what i'm trying to look at in terms of my periodization is i'm trying to say okay right now what is the thing that's keeping me from moving on right because now if i switch over to that i'm potentiating the next phase that i come

back that's more stereotypical like hypertrophy you know type programming right and that's you know we can get some hypertrophy in a wide variety of programs especially in the beginner the more advanced it's you get the more it's going to be like you're going to have blocks where you grow and then you're going to have blocks where you're potentiating growth but you're not really going to grow in those with those other blocks but if you're a beginner like you might you might continue to make gains on your metabolic phase and your neurological phase and whatnot right and you just got to enjoy that while it lasts yeah when you talk about potentiating growth and you're in kind of with a an advanced lifter what does that look like in that they can't be i shouldn't say they

can't but they're not typically going to be working on top end strength just because as you said they carry too much muscle mass and they're not they're not doing you know maximum effort effort work yeah so in terms of potentiation i need to one i need to make sure that the thing that actually limits them in training is the pursuit of that stimulus so that means they have to be like, okay, we need to store lots of glycogen. We need to be really good at converting fuel into energy, both during the workout and then also after the workout because protein synthesis is not free, right? Like all of the like anabolic things that happen, that all depends on us rebalancing energy.

So the better my cell can utilize both utilize both fat carbs drive all that fuel into the cell and then be like okay we got all the energy that we want we can invest resources into now protein synthesis and doing all these other things that's the that's what i'm trying to look at from a performance and a recovery perspective locally and then globally it's about okay if i've been training and like say the the lower end ranges of hypertrophy and my program's just not that cardiovascular dominant how long before maybe i see my resting heart rate going up or my hrv going up and i just see like okay this person's not tolerating the training frequency anymore because they're just systemically not recovering as much

we've continued to pile on volume or whatever and now what they need is they need to be more systemically resilient both to the volume of training and then they need to be more systemically efficient so that we can be recovering better in the hours outside of the gym so when i'm looking at potentiating i'm looking at bringing up either the performance or the recovery system that i think is most limiting. So if I have somebody and they just felt like, man, they just, they fatigue earlier in volume than I think they should. What I'm probably going to do then is I'm going to say, okay, we're going to do something that's very locally metabolically challenging. Cause I think that's the reason we're peddling

out is like you, we just can't get enough fuel in that, in those muscles. And we can't use it efficiently enough that in order for me to get the volume of mechanical tension stimulus i need to remove energy as the rate limiting factor right if so hopefully that's not overly complex um but no i just saw what i'm trying to do i just saw mash's mouth move with no sound come out. That's because I was muted, my bad. I was waiting for it to come out. He said something. He was talking. I definitely am in that same boat.

Right now, metabolically, it needs to be a focus on my own training. It's definitely my limiting factor now as a 47-year-old man is being able to have the capacity to train longer. I wanted to actually think about kind of the idea of like a deload. It doesn't sound like you're, you program a couple points ago, you were talking about an exercise that you can, instead of backing that down for a week and then going back after it, you're just kind of picking up a new orange and squeezing that one or going to a new body part to focus on. How do you, how do you think about deloads or taking a week, a down week? When you start to see recovery

come down, that diminishing returns, and you don't try and drive it, those extra couple weeks where then you're just really digging yourself into a hole. I think in those cases, you can pivot more often throughout the year than you need to do a complete deload because it's enough deload if you switch to doing something drastically different it's like man i'm really fatigued for doing all this heavy training right then okay maybe i spend two weeks doing like lighter loads dense work upper lower supersets like whatever type of metabolic works like i'm not going to be working at thresholds of like weight and intensity that are going to stress the same systems per se as i was getting in that other one so i am deloading some things i'm just also being productive while i'm deloading those things i'm still it's like man i

can get stimulus over here i can still make improvements in this area why wouldn't why wouldn't i do that? But sometimes, you know, you just push the needle and you do need just, you just, you need a dealer. Do you need a week of like, you know, sauna massage on the beach? Like that's, that's exactly what you need. Right. Would you say the same for strength sports? Like powerlifting, weightlifting? That's what I was going to say. No, you're good. I'm totally stuffing it now. I want to know from my own athletes. It's exactly what I was thinking.

In a strength-specific sport where you have to snatch and clean and jerk every single day to just continually do it. One, do you coach Olympic weightlifters? I do not. Gotcha. You're about to have an influence on them.

Yeah. I mean, I can speak to the physiology. Yeah, but when somebody's sport requires they do the same two things almost daily in their lives to practice the specific sport, how do they go about fluctuating that, especially when the energy system that they're in is specifically inside three reps every day? Yeah. It's not like a set of 12 yeah totally so i think important context for me to lay is that when i'm throwing in like these breaks or metabolic things like i'm not jumping out for like eight weeks you know of you know german body comp training or whatever it's sometimes only a single week up to maybe three weeks for these people because it's

like they don't they don't need to become an ultra marathoner in between hypertrophy blocks right they just need to not suck metabolically they need to not suck so much that it's not the limiting factor for the training like there you go pretty happy now that he's like no for you maybe 16 16 weeks is what i'm thinking no um yeah so for somebody like that the fears are generally like oh if i stop doing heavy loads or you know if i stop doing you know singles and doubles and triples whatever that i'm going to lose strength or it's like oh if i don't do this exercise i'm going to lose that that uh motor pattern in my experience not specifically with Olympic lifting,

but a lot with power lifting, and then also like skill-based sports, like whether it be like MMA, football, et cetera, is that like taking a week or two off of those skill-based drills, it only takes them like one week to get right back to where they were from a motor competency standpoint and tech in a load standpoint, when we're only jumping out for one to three weeks. And then often what you see is they're now rate of improvement in those

things. It's significantly more. So if you look at somebody, say they were like doing eight weeks of a, you know, of a power or a Olympic lifting training cycle, you know, you're not making improvements week seven to eight,

the way that you were week two to three. And what happens usually is, is that when we take this little breakout, we bring up some of those recovery systems, you know, maybe we give the joints a little bit of a break from those movement patterns, et cetera. Cause a lot of times if you're like, if you're a power lifter, you got to squat, not the best way for your hips and knees. You've got to squat for the, you know, you've got to squat for what's legal in the sport, is that they jump back in there, and there's maybe like one week

of getting back at it, and then they're now progressing like they were earlier, you know, in that program. So over the course of 16 weeks, they should make more progress. And I think the injury risk is significantly lower based off of just the anecdotes that we've seen and people that routinely do that. You know, Brian man said the same thing. Like he said, you know, like I said earlier, it's like, you know, when you see that you're at that state of fatigue, that's your, you know, your velocity is at least 10% down. You know, I, in my thought, my initial thought would be like, well, should you just back down and focus on technique?

And he said that if you're 10% or more, you know, slower than normal, what's going to happen? Your CNS is messed up, so you're not going to do really well, even with technique work because your brain is not working. You know, you've got to have that that uh you know hippocampus and your medulla oblongata have to be sinking and if you're 10% off you're so fatigued that's probably not going to happen therefore you're better off go away from the stimulus completely body build like you're saying so that just confirms you know what i've been thinking in any way the other thing

when you're looking at performance-based stuff is that there's a diminishing returns on how sub maximally you can practice that quality right me you know totally you can't take a week off of sprinting and be like well i'm gonna jog because that's gonna help my maintain my sprint mechanics it doesn't it doesn't work like that right so i see that argument a lot of the time like people like oh i'm gonna still squat i'm just gonna back it down to like 70 or whatever i'm like no just like like because practicing that squat that's not going to help you with the the perform like stepping back for a week and doing that like it's not going to do you any good you're not you're not practicing it close enough to the skill that you need to express anymore. You said earlier too, like about the quad, like you said something about do squats, are they a quad exercise? And like, are you talking

about, were you referring to the rectus femoris, the fact that it's not worked that much in squatting or what was that reference? And like the first thing you said. Oh no, that was just the fact that like some people have a hard time loading the knee in comparison to the hip just because of their body structures right sure you know i mean so like you know like lane norton's a guy that gets all kinds of crap for his squat but if you look at lane's structure like lane's not going to squat like a chinese lifter he's got long femurs and a short torso right so everybody's everybody's ability to fold you know there's gonna there's gonna be limitations in there some things we can just some things we can improve through mobility but there's

also like just strength limitations and stuff as well for instance like one of the things that i talked about with on ben's podcast um we're you know talking about the squat is that look if you just if your quads are only so strong your body body's only going to let you push the knees forward so much. It's not going to let you put more load on them than they can tolerate. So guess what? When you run out of how much work the quads can do, I don't care how much ankle mobility. Your hips have got to make up for the rest of that load. So it's going to be hip dominant.

So if my goal is like, man, I want to work my quads is that the most efficient way to do it it's like well if you're okay with all of that hip coming on top of it like then then maybe right but if you're like well actually no this is not supposed to be my hip dominant day i'm doing pulls on another day it's like well then yeah like this is we either need to change your squat with you know the where we're positioning the bar heel ledges, et cetera. Or if you have access to, you know, just better equipment, like a hack squat or something, then that's, that's a much more efficient way to do it. You mentioned the hip dominant day versus squat dominant day a couple of times now. Uh, is that the most common kind of weekly structure that you, that you fall under? We have like a two upper, two lower by days, one's hip dominant,

one's knee dominant, or why, why are you always referencing the hip dominant days? Um, well for people that tend to like be insistent on including the squat, they're usually doing the SBD. Um, and so usually they have a, they have a squatting day and then they have, they have a pulling day. So that's why I always kind of put that in there for context. Cause you know, like most bodybuilders, if you tell them like, yeah, you don't need to squat, they're like, okay. Right. Like, but it's, but it's usually people that really want, it's like, yeah, I care about my squat. I squat bench dead or whatever.

It's like, then we typically see people that like, they have some sort of rotation where they have a squat day and they have a deadlift day. I don't think anybody that can squat or deadlift a decent amount does them both on the same day. That just does not happen. I did. Yeah, you did. I mean, I did. Bash was really good at not listening to people too. Yeah.

Or be the strongest man in the world. I did both because of sports specific. My train of thought was like, because I have to do it at the meet, I should probably do it in training specific. I was thinking, you know, my train of thought was like, because I have to do it at the meet, I should probably do it in training. Now, I will say this. You know, the day that I intended to be the main focus, deadlifting, the squatting wasn't, you know, the intensity was less. And so I did focus that, but I still normally always did a squat and a deadlift.

I was pretty good at both. But you were fluctuating the volume a little bit right yes yeah definitely yes definitely focusing on one or the other so that's totally true yes and i haven't seen your squat or your dead because it's a totally different scenario and somebody that naturally has the very vertical torso when they squat like their squat is naturally very like quad dominant like for them like if they got great mechanics, their squat and their deadlift, just they're already very different. But if you take somebody

who's squat and deadlift look like the same thing, but just one with the bar in their hands and one with the bar on their back, then we're talking a totally different scenario, right? I'm totally different. I'm totally opposite.

You hit the nail on the head. Like I see the very vertical in squats. You know, deadlifting is obviously more of a hinge. Man, this was awesome. We're going to have you back on. I feel like we really just scratched the surface. I feel like we found you, and we have a lot to talk about now.

This is awesome. Impressive. Yeah, I appreciate it. Where can people find you? So I'm most active on Instagram. You can follow me at Coach underscore Kassem, K-A-s-s-e-m uh but we also put out uh content on our our brand sites it's kind of like more tips and tricks mostly what you're going to get on my mind is a little bit about what we're currently doing mixed in with some rants

um probably a i try and keep it a two to one ratio but sometimes i think it gets flipped quite a bit uh but so those are at n1.education and at n1.training if you're a coach we have courses on education um if you just want like our lowest hanging fruit content n1 training is where we cover a lot of the biomechanics and like exercise selection stuff that you know the average person can use yeah do you guys run coaches seminars athlete seminars when the world's open? Yeah. I mean, our main bread and butter is to actually teach biomechanics in person. So we tend to do it in tandem.

We do an online course that people take before and then we do that. But obviously COVID's kind of knocked that out. But our goal is as soon as the world opens back up, you know, start doing those at an accelerated rate. And actually one of the things we're hoping to do with the lab is to add a lab-based practical where we can actually get people to come in. We put them on here. We not only teach them some science, but we give them some data about themselves to leave with to, you know,

kind of individualize their programming even further. Amazing. Awesome. Coach Travis Smash. Mashalete.com or go to Mashalete Performance on Instagram. That was awesome, byvis smash mashally.com or go to mashally performance on instagram that was awesome by the way yeah i mean i did got part of you so much i could talk about this for the rest of my life which is i guess what i'm going to be doing get ready here we go doug larson you bet i appreciate coming on that was really fun

uh you can find me on instagram at Douglas C. Larson. I really appreciate it. I'm Anders Varner. At Anders Varner, we're Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged. Get over to BarbellShrugged.com forward slash store. That is where you're going to find all the e-books, programs, nutrition, and mobility to make strong people stronger. We'll see you guys next week. Radical friends.

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